Caterpillar unveils latest "Built For It" video

Caterpillar is proving that some of its equipment is small and agile enough to maneuver through a china shop.

The manufacturing company’s latest promotional video to hit YouTube Tuesday features a mini hydraulic excavator moving through narrow aisles of more than 40-thousand dollars of breakable merchandise. The machine then picks up a wine glass and places it on top of a pyramid of glasses, leaving the shop’s product’s unscathed.

The promotional video was inspired by the phrase, “a bull in a china shop,” and is the third in Cat’s “Built For It” series. Archie Lyons is the Creative Director for Caterpillar’s Global Brand Marketing.

“When we actually came up with the concept of the bull in the china shop, we honestly could not find a china shop that would allow us to do the operation in it, so we built our own. And as we built it, the operator of the machine is the one who actually encouraged us to keep tightening it up. So the aisles that you see in the china shop on our show are actually tighter than a normal china shop’s aisles,” says Lyons.

Lyons says the makeshift store was made up of rented porcelain plates, glassware and some expensive employee heirlooms. He says the most asked question is whether anything was broken during the video shoot.

“Yes, three pieces did get broke. But it was before and after the filming. The machine had nothing to do with it. It was when we as the art department were unpacking and re-packing that we broke and dropped some of the glasses.”